She was more than half way to the top now. A voice jabbered on from just outside the ring of trees.
“Well, how do we get in? There’s smoke!”
“It’s a chemo-dimensional reaction. She must have moved before it was done. Why did she use the bulbs? The Assembly isn’t even here!”
It sounded like Jared and maybe that Banch woman. Kaitlin’s mind, again, was probably doing naked jumping jacks, but still, she played along, even if this was a hallucination. “Jared? Is that you? I’m almost to the top!” she cried out.
“Keep going!” the woman’s voice replied.
Kaitlin craned her neck and was slammed in the face with another falling branch.
She lost hold and fell.
Fire engulfed her completely. But something tingled around her body, especially in the two open wounds in her fingers—they pulsed in the bare sockets almost like an SOS and suddenly the fire sucked into the ground and the trees vanished.
Kaitlin stood there on the sidewalk, clothing lightly singed and her skin feeling like it’d spent the day at a nude beach with no sun block. The air around her hung with the odors of burnt paper and sweat. She hadn’t realized it until now, but she was weeping. Jared bounded over and caught her.
Then everything went dark.
Chapter 18
Jared
The people affected by the Gilded Scream had to be shooed away. They set up a makeshift bed for Kaitlin with t-shirts and black fabric cushions from the bench in the restaurant’s lobby. All were arranged on the sidewalk with exacting care. Many offered to drive her to the hospital, but one man insisted on calling his brother-in-law who drove an ambulance for a living. Other emergency calls were placed too. The bleeding in Kaitlin’s hand wasn’t completely under control at the moment, but much better than before. Thoroughly cleaned and bandaged, one of the gilded now kept her hand elevated.
“How did she not catch on fire? Those flames were so intense.” Jared moved some crimson locks of hair away and touched his friend’s flushed face. She slept a restless sleep.
Banch watched the street like an indomitable hawk. “The fire wasn’t completely resident in this world. The chemo-dimensional reaction occurred by the coupling of her flesh and the trees. Two different groups of matter shared the same residency. She moved into the trees’ space and that set off the reaction, causing a fire, which then lost all residence when she fell into it. It could have started a minor disturbance paradigm, but thankfully it did not.”
“Makes sense,” Jared muttered, shaking his head.
Banch silently said something—it sounded more like whispered singing than just mere words.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Since we’ve lost time and our edge with the Assembly, I’m working out one of the new screams I learned from my twin.”
“I can take the car and drive to the beach,” Jared told her. “I just need to make sure Kaitlin gets on her way to the hospital first.”
“It wouldn’t matter. The Assembly will be reestablished very soon. You would have to leave right now and there’s still a chance of them intercepting you at the beach. Assuming they asked the Silent Kings for the Lung Spike as their second grant, their expense account has not run out. They still have one grant left, and I believe they’ll use it for direct access to the beach through a corridor shadow. They’ve been avoiding going anywhere near the beach since the water scares them like nothing else, but they’ll face their fears if they know they’re going to lose you.”
Kaitlin stirred and Jared leaned in closer. “Easy Kait, easy, we’re getting you help.”
“Knew the fire… was a hallucination,” she said and smacked her dry lips. “Sucked in poisonous gas. Terrorists.”
“You’re safe now.”
Banch resumed practicing her new scream. The ginger-haired accountant holding Kaitlin’s wounded hand in the air winced and supported his arm with his free hand.
“I can take it,” Jared offered.
“No!” the man said, his eyes wide with disappointment behind the lenses of his glasses.
“I got this. Trust me. My muscles are only a bit tired.”
“You’ve held it a long time. Let me take over and you can come back in ten minutes.” Jared noticed the man’s reluctance and added, “I don’t want you to drop it.”
In sullen agreement, the accountant nodded, and Jared gently took Kaitlin’s wrist.
“I’ll be back soon,” the man said. “Going for Motrin in my car. Do you need anything?”
“No thanks.”
He got up, and with one more thoughtful look back, shuffled across the street to the parking lot.
“Who were you just talking to?” Kaitlin asked. She had come more fully awake now.
“Oh,” said Jared, “just someone who helped us out.”
Her eyes darted around. “Don’t see anyone.”
“Kait,” he said softly, “why the hell did you come here?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What has gotten into you, Jared?”
“Wait up, let’s talk about you. Coming out here and almost getting yourself killed. What? Just in the name of babysitting me? You wouldn’t have gotten hurt if you just listened to me and stayed put.”
Kaitlin closed her eyes. For a few minutes he thought she’d slipped off again, but when her eyelids drew up once more, clarity was there, greater than it had ever been. “Jared, you’re my best friend. I love you more than most of my own blood relatives—”
“STOP IT!” he shouted, and Kaitlin flinched at his volume. “You will never love me. Okay? You’ve only made my life harder.”
“Just calm down for a second—”
“Just stay out of my life from now on,” he said, looking her levelly in the eyes. “I don’t need your help anymore.”
“And how about her?” Kaitlin looked to Banch, who was doing a poor job of appearing to not listen to their discussion. “That’s how it is?”
Jared seethed. “I need no one, okay? Nobody.”
A moment later the whine of an ambulance rounded the street. Dozens of the gilded came out waving their hands and pointed at Kaitlin, making it impossible for the ambulance to miss her.
Jared didn’t say anything else to Kaitlin. He spoke with the paramedics and gave them her purse, but that was all. In his mind the same idea kept repeating, goodbye, so long, farewell, later... His eyes watered at the insistent mantra. As the EMTs put Kaitlin into the ambulance on the stretcher, he saw her eyes watering too. It wasn’t like her to cry.
Better to hurt now, my old friend, my first love, thought Jared. If I escape today, I’ll be gone in a few months, at best, and this will be easier.
The doors of the ambulance shut.
Forgive me, Kaitlin.
Jared watched the ambulance hurry up the street, cars pulling to the side of the road. Banch rested a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry that happened.”
He whirled around. “Nobody else was supposed to get hurt. You said that. How can I trust you now?” He pressed a fist between his eyes, shaking his head. “I’m just going to wait here. Screw this. Let them have me. I’m done. My knees are about to give anyway.”
Banch thoughtfully pursed her lips momentarily. Over her eyes, a few flags of metallic magenta and brown hair rippled in the steady breeze. “Did you know the Assembly has a machine in the fortress that smashes a prisoner’s groin with an anvil attached to a counter-weighted pendulum? The process goes until they decide to stop it. How do your knees feel now?”
“God…”
“And I might add, this is the machine the male prisoners often hope for after suffering other devices. It’s the most forgiving of their toys.”
Jared felt his muffuletta start to rise.
“I know why you told Kaitlin what you did, believe me I do,” said Banch. “But whether you know it or not, I’ve been with you longer than her and you can’t push me away so easily.”
He folded his arms and sighed. “Fine. Then what
the hell next?”
“This.”
Banch opened her mouth. Something like a harp of gold lit inside her throat. All colors around them, on the ground, in the distance, in the air, began to separate and drift in different directions like strands of fog. The sun flickered overhead. Then, so suddenly, there were two suns—twelve—two-hundred—too many to conceive, and in the next blink the sky fell to night and the moon came out in a similar fashion, spraying multiple versions of itself across the heaves. Ghostly images of people flashed all around them, some with archaic clothing going back to the 1800s and beyond. The weather went from hot to cold to rainy to windy in seconds. Banch closed her mouth then, and the world at once returned to how it had been before. The glowing voice box in her neck quieted in intensity until it could no longer be distinguished.
“What… did you do?” he asked warily.
She rubbed at her throat a little. “That was the Chronos Scream. My first invocation but it seems to have worked, though if I hadn’t stripped out my voice on that Swell, it would have worked better.”
Jared noticed everybody frozen in place on the sidewalks. A pair of birds overhead appeared stuck in the sky. Even the cars in the street had halted.
“You’ve stopped time?”
“Not stopped, slowed it down. We have about twelve hours that will roughly translate into five real minutes. Had I more practice and less wear on my voice, I could have made this last for days, maybe weeks.”
Jared’s heart rocked violently in his chest, suspended on fraying wires.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just this chest thing. I’ll be fine.” He glanced down the street in wonder. “We’ll definitely make it to the beach if we have twelve extra hours. I think it’s probably only about a few more hours of walking.”
“Indeed, but I wanted to buy us more than just certainty. I want to spend some time together, resting,” said Banch. “If you die today, before the scheduled date, the Assembly will claim you through a different banshee. You’ll be like a special delivery package that goes immediately to their feet. All of this will be for nothing.”
Detergent in hand, he limped along with her for a moment. His knees burned and shook. “That could happen? I thought it wasn’t my time to go yet.”
“Well, this day technically wasn’t supposed to go this way for you. All this stress might invoke something earlier. We have to be careful.”
“I’m not opposed to resting,” he admitted. “If it’s safe, I guess.”
Banch took out a business card. It was for the Marriott hotel. “Remember when all those gilded insisted you put their contact information in your phone? Well, I got to talking to one of them while you were doing that. Apparently he operates several of these hotels. His office is located at one of them just a couple blocks away he said. He set us up in a suite while you were taking phone numbers.”
“So you planned on this?”
“He offered without asking and I didn’t bother saying no. But now it makes sense to take him up on it, right? It was meant to be. Let’s take six hours together for ourselves, before moving on.”
“I feel like we’re still pushing our luck here.”
“If you feel like leaving earlier, we certainly can. Let’s at least rest your legs some.”
“How could I say no to more time with you?”
She grinned. “There is a clothing store on the way. I want to change out of this uniform, okay?”
Jared reached out and took the banshee’s hand. “I guess it’s a date.”
* * *
When Jared was twenty-five years old…
He went with his dad, Bob, on walks in the park. They were often the same route as those walks Jared had taken with his mother when she was still alive. He had grown used to them and his day became dependent on having a stroll after work.
It was spring and the world made that clear. Butterflies found purchase on the wind. Plant life restored to vibrancy. His father’s hay fever was at two hundred percent. They both enjoyed this time, even though they rarely said much together. Bob sometimes talked about crucial Dodgers decisions in management or lamented about not being able to make it to spring training, but that was normally the extent of the discussions. So when he started talking about the weird sensation in his chest one afternoon, Jared almost paid it no mind; he was accustomed to tuning his father out.
“Hold on, hold on.” He took Jared’s shoulder. His face seemed to collapse under a tremendous weight and his eyes went glassy.
“Dad?”
“I have medication.” Bob fell forward and Jared held him. His father wasn’t as big as he used to be. He’d lost a lot of weight after his wife died and Jared held him easily. “In… the glove compartment.”
“What do you mean? Medication for what? What’s happening?”
Bob sank to his knees and Jared dropped down with him. “I can’t find the car, Dad. I need help. You know that.”
“We come this way every day!” Bob shut his eyes, his voice disgusted.
“Is it over there, that way?” Jared pointed. His heart pounded in his throat. His hands trembled fiercely.
“I have to lie down.” His father curled into a fetal ball right there on the grassy hill. He dug into his pocket and handed Jared the car keys.
Memories of the next moments had a painful razor blade quality to them; they stuck finely in Jared’s mind, but each moment was its own and nothing connected it.
He got lost trying to find the car.
He ran into a nice couple walking their dog.
They helped him find the car.
He got lost finding the right hill again.
When he did find him, his father was still coherent and took the pills.
The medication worked but Bob was admitted to the hospital that night. Jared recalled very little of that evening, except a moment where they quietly watched the full moon out the hospital window.
“I wonder how many people are staring at it like us,” his father said.
Jared shrugged. “A lot, probably.”
Jared remembered how his mother had called the moon just a big rock in the sky, nothing special. He didn’t want to bring that up though.
“How many dreams and wishes are aimed up there, right now?” Bob scratched the top of his bald head with the tip of the heart monitor on his finger. “It’s a magic thing, the moon. I’ve always thought so.”
“I guess it could be.”
“Oh, it is.” He nodded, taking another long look at the radiant sphere. “And you know why I know that?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t understand its power over me, and that’s real magic, son. It makes me happy sometimes when I can’t for the life of me find anything to be really happy about. Such power there. So, so powerful. It’s a wonder and it belongs to us all.”
Jared continued to watch silently.
Two days later, Bob Kare passed away. Jared, Kaitlin, and his estranged sister, Jared’s aunt Becky, were at his bedside. Natural causes were cited. Jared never learned what his father’s medication had been for. The events were too blurred together and his emotions too out of sorts. He wasn’t in a place to care about the cause. His dad was gone. The last piece of his protection blown to bits. His desperation kicked into high gear.
After they were led out of the hospital room, he remembered Kaitlin slipping her hands around his waist and drawing him close. He got an erection, and hated himself for it. This was supposed to be a solemn time and here he was getting hard. He prayed she didn’t feel it. If she had, Kaitlin must have been so disgusted, not just because she wasn’t interested but because it was awful timing. Awful.
But she held him tighter. Closer. The air became her perfume 212. He loved her… so much, it was stupid. He had to be mental. The only way he could get past this moment was through her and yet he knew he’d hold her back, just as he had with his parents, until their deaths. They died unhappy because he wasn’t brave enough to tak
e care of himself.
It was inconceivable. He couldn’t believe his father was gone. His grandfather had lived to ninety-two years of age. This genetically didn’t compute—plus his father had taken his meds in time. Hadn’t he? Had Jared’s taking so long and getting lost contributed somehow? Or had it just been a matter of time?
At the wake, Jared heard nothing said. People actually stood and clapped after Kaitlin’s speech, but Jared had heard none of it. He could only think of his first memories of his father. He must have been around three or so. His dad needed to go into the gas station to pick up cigars. He’d pointed at the gear shift and said, “Don’t mess with that. I’ll be right back.”
Jared recalled a sense of indignation. Here was a grown-up trying to keep him from something interesting. He moved the stick into neutral. The pick-up truck rolled back. He remembered seeing his dad hauling ass to catch up with the vehicle before it dropped into the street and into oncoming traffic. Somehow he caught up with the truck, opened the door, and threw the parking brake.
Jared’s next recollection was crying into his dad’s shoulder. His father wasn’t angry, even though Jared assumed he’d be. Bob hummed a song, the bass vibrations going through Jared’s chest, calming every wicked, sharp-toothed beast gnawing from within.
That day, when he realized his father was gone forever, Jared longed to feel that humming again, that gentle sound flowing through him.
But that was done, over. He was alone, in silence.
His father’s favorite mechanic, Bae, and his wife, Eun Sun, visited Jared every day that week and the week after. The visits became steadier and more frequent, until they were incorporated firmly into his existence. The Kangjuns and Kaitlin, from there on out. He loved them, and Jared would always know, without a doubt, that he owed them his life.
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